The Breakup of Ma Bell.

[Dan/Panther]

I know that emotionally that is a soft spot for Western Electric collectors, and it's something we haven't really discussed.  Do you think The breaking up of Ma Bell was a Good thing  or a bad thing, as far a competition is concerned, and why.
D/P

[GusHerb]

That seems like a pretty hard one to answer. I think somehow if they didn't break up they would still be a very very different company now from then. if not even somewhere near what they are currently. I think for surely if Ma Bell didn't break up something else for surely would have come along and made it happen or just make them become a very very different company.

lol one thing that IS good about they're break up is that we can now collect the old phones... who know's if that would have been possible if they didn't break apart.

[foots]

  I think it's a good thing that it broke up. A monopoly is never a good thing in my opinion. This allows a single company to have too much sway, especially with the government. Also, if the Bell System was still around today, who knows how much we'd be paying for cell phone and internet services.

[AET]

Ha, the Ma Bell breakup happened 6 years before I was born.  My mom was the same age I am now when it happened.  I wasn't there, but complain about it, because as mostly a WE guy I love the Bell System.  You all make good points about it being a good thing though.  I do love to see remnants of it here and there, like our Verizon payphones at work with the Bell System logo on them and that sort of thing.

[Greg G.]

I've been considering getting this book to get another view.  This much we all know - when the phone company owned the phones, they were made to last.  Now we have cheap Chinese made crap.

The Rape of Ma Bell

[bwanna]

this is a tough question.

according to my co-workers who were w/ the phone company (bell) prior de-regulation, it was a better place to work then. competition forces the company to be much more profit driven. i have seen many changes in my 10yr tenure, as the number of alternate local carriers has grown. more  "bean counting"& micro-management. i'll stop short of climbing on the soapbox about the effects all this has on good union jobs.

from a customer stand point, of course, competitive prices are good. also the options available, like choosing what kind of phone we like, where/ how many to have in the house. if the telco still owned all the sets, i imagine there would still be just one or two industry standard models.

who knows what effect telco regulation would have had on internet & cell phone service.

IMHO

[Wallphone]

At the time of the breakup they were making phones in Asia so the quality was already compromised.
When it came time to divide up the pieces with AT&T retaining the long distance piece, AT&T let the Baby Bells have the cellular piece because they didn't see much of a future in it. Where would cell phone technology be today if the breakup had not happened? Even after they tried to put all the pieces back together again, Bell Labs and Western Electric were already destroyed, so in my opinion, that was the biggest casualty of this government fiasco.
The Rape of Ma Bell can be found for free on-line at the old David Massey site.
> http://www.porticus.org/bell/rapeofmabell.htm <
"Manufacturing the Future" is another good book to read. Cheap copies can be found at Amazon.
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0521651182/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used <
Dougpav

[Bill]

A monopoly is never a good thing

If we're talking about an unregulated monopoly, that is probably right, and for all the obvious reasons. But the Bell System was a highly regulated monopoly, so the answer may not be so clear, at least to me.

AT&T let the Baby Bells have the cellular piece because they didn't see much of a future in it. Where would cell phone technology be today if the breakup had not happened?

Remember that the whole concept of cellular telephony was invented by Bell Labs. And its initial deployment was done by the Bell System.  Apparently they saw at least that much future in it.

Yes, as a communications engineer, I have a soft spot for the old Bell System, and especially Bell Labs.

The Bell System Memorial site has a good review of the breakup and its results. It may not be entirely objective, of course.
http://www.porticus.org/bell/att_divestiture.html

Bill

[Dan/Panther]

In the first half of my lifespan, late forties to late seventies, seemed like every time a major invention came along it had the Bell Labs name on it, What has Lucnet pioneered in the last 25 years ?
D/P

[paul-f]

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/BellLabs
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/BellLabs/Research

[rp2813]

Basically what happened as a result if divestiture is that the telcos went from being service-oriented and engineering-run operations to sales-oriented and marketing-run.  Top notch customer service was doomed, and ultimately deteriorated to the current low levels with someone for whom English is a second language reading from a script halfway around the world from here.

If I recall correctly, customers were able to own their phones prior to the break-up of 1984, but WECo was still cranking them out.  It wasn't until the Lucent/AT&T Technologies situation that we started seeing crap that wasn't built to last anymore being billed as the same sort of top-quality product we had been used to seeing from WECo.

I don't think we should rush to the conclusion that divestiture helped speed up technological advances.  Plenty of countries in Europe have monopoly situations yet they were light years ahead of us with both cellular service and DSL, and still are to a large degree.

The ruthless (tens of thousands) layoffs we've seen by AT&T over the past few years have all been driven by shareholder demands.  I'd wager that they wouldn't have happened if the company was still a monopoly.  I put in 17 years with them and would probably still be working for them if not for shareholder greed and Board of Directors cronies who quickly ask "How high?" when those shareholders tell them to jump.

Donna, I hope you voted "FOR" the proposals on our latest proxy forms . . .

[bwanna]

i am using divestiture & deregulation as interchangeable terms. this is not really accurate. deregulation refers to wiring & equipment inside the customer no longer owned/regulated by the telco. divestiture is the whole breakup of the monoply allowing alternate providers to enter the scene. there are still government regulations to abide by.

shoddy service is not exclusive to the phone company. it took me about 2 hours this morning to make changes to my cable tv service plan.

btw.....the techs in the field provide excellent service..

[paul-f]

As I recall, the breakup of the Bell System was part of a deal to let the phone companies participate in the coming digital data communications revolution in an unregulated fashion.  Bell Labs had the technology and they could forsee a future where POTS phones would be dinosaurs.

It's interesting to see it still playing out, as Verizon sells off the "legacy" wireline business in remote areas to Frontier and others, so they could take the hit and declare bankruptcy.  Now Verizon and AT&T are petitioning the FCC to make it a national priority to shut down POTS once and for all. 

You can follow their posts on the comment system at www.fcc.gov.  It's quite entertaining.

[Dan/Panther]

Paul;
Thanks for the links, maybe it was because Bell System was such a part of school in the 50's..
D/P

[paul-f]

The Bell System sure seemed to be everywhere when we were young.

I still get a charge out of watching how TPC (The Phone Company) was portrayed in the 1967 film "The President's Analyst."  Perhaps that sense that the phone company was all-powerful contributed to the Justice Department investigations.